All Drupal All The Time – Too Bad I Can’t Breathe

Writing on the iPhone. Hard to breathe. Shaky. Strangely okay besides that. Sometimes writing helps. Been very busy lately. All Drupal all the time. Besides from the insane learning curve and non-intuitive UI, I am in awe of its power and flexibility. After more than 15 hours of video tutorials and reading tons of docs, …

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Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Tech Support Secrets (click to enlarge) [singlepic id=28 w=450 h=505 float=none] From xkcd. Thanks to Joni Mueller for the link 🙂

21 Favorite Mac Apps of the Moment

Update (8/3/09): Added SuperDuper! to list and changed title. Just got my aluminum imac replaced by Apple. The old one was kind of possessed by gremlins or some such thing. After several failed repair attempts, part replacements, and countless hours of phone support, Apple agreed to give me a shiny new computer. Loving it 🙂 …

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Professional Frontend Engineering Video

This video, Nate Koechley: “Professional Frontend Engineering” from Yahoo! Video, is a great presentation about the current state of frontend web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I was completely captivated for the full hour and a half that the presentation lasted.

Nate started out with a history of website development starting with a 1994 version of the Yahoo! website and continuing until the present. He also spoke about the evolution of technologies and trends over the years. It was interesting to hear about how table based design became popular and why it was necessary at the time.

Next up was an overview of current beliefs and principles of front end engineering, which covered progressive enhancement, unobtrusive javascript, and the importance of making the website available to the largest possible audience.

The next section, Knowledge Areas and Best Practices, covered rendering modes, doctypes, and using each technology appropriately, i.e. html for semantic markup, css for presentation, and unobtrusive javascript for behavior. One thing I found interesting was that he considered it more important to keep the css code for each area in the same place by using hacks for IE6 and IE7, even though it would prevent the css from validating. I usually use conditional comments and separate stylesheets for different versions or combinations of versions of IE and can definitely see the benefit of Nate’s approach, as well as how it could be a big timesaver.

The presentation wrapped up with the ‘Why It All Matters’ segment which brought everything together and included a call to action for developers to stay vigilant, keep up with modern technologies and the bugs that arise from them, and to continue making the internet a better experience for everyone.

Chalkboard Color Scheme for Komodo

Komodo PHP Sample

This color scheme is updated regularly. (View Updates) Komodo Edit 5 has been my default code editor for the past week or so. It is much faster and nicer to look at than previous versions that I have tried. I switch default code editors almost as often as I switch default browsers. There are so …

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BeeDragon on Facebook

I have been doing a lot of research into freelance networking. My favorite source of information is Freelance Radio, the FreelanceSwitch podcast. It is by far the best of the freelance podcasts I have listened to. The panel is excellent. The host, John Brougher, does a great job of keeping the podcast on topic while …

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WordPress eCommerce Plugins: Shopp vs WP e-Commerce

Update (10/21/09): Comments for this post have been closed. Thanks for your comments everyone! It has been nearly a year since I wrote this review. It is based on WP e-Commerce 3.6.9 and Shopp 1.0. Both plugins have had significant upgrades since then. I bought a developer license for Shopp and have used it in …

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Poetic Prophet | Design Coding

Stumbled across this while reading about browsers at molly.com. I am not completely sure if it will appeal as much to the non-web designer/developer crowd as it did to me.

By Poetic Prophet – SEO Rapper (aka Chuck Lewis)

Lyrics:

Design Coding

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information

display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation

every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction

follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time

make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat

tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox

title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong

when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker

design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter

if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

WordPress 2.7

Earlier today, I updated this site to WordPress 2.7. It was a completely smooth upgrade, even though I forgot to disable my plugins and 2.7 is only a release candidate. I have been using the beta version, and now RC1 on a website I have been building for the past couple of months. It has …

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Pictures Without Words

Today I found FFFFOUND! FFFFOUND! is an invitation-only web image-bookmarking service that also dynamically suggests other images that may be of interest to the user based on their tastes and interests. It was hard to get away from it even long enough to post this. Image credit: Design You Trust There were a few things that made …

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Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

I spent way more time wordling yesterday than I care to admit here. It was kind of mesmerizing. I made one by entering the main LBnuke URL and a bunch by entering the feed URL. The ones with “Things” as the big word is from the feed and contains words from a broader search than the one with “Time” as the big word. I liked how changing the colors and layouts affected which words stood out the most when viewing the images. Of course the largest ones always stood out the most, but color brightness and word orientation made a big difference in some cases too. There is a gallery at the Wordle site containing images from other people’s wordles. I found the ones from the presidential and vice presidential debates pretty interesting. All images in this gallery were created at Wordle.net.

Baltimore

LB and K at the party Mon 9/22/08 10:46am On the plane from Baltimore to Oakland, stop in Denver. Had lots of fun in Baltimore. We went to an overnight birthday party for a couple of K’s friends that were turning 40 and had a great time. I really like K’s Maryland people. I am …

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Work, WordCamp, Dolly, Autiblogger, and .me

This week started out kind of insane. Nearly all of my clients wanted things at once. It hurt my brain pretty bad, but somehow I managed to get almost everything done. To make matters worse, my work environment has become somewhat of an ergonomic nightmare. I fixed my wrist problem by switching to a trackball, wearing …

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Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Joss Whedan. Neil Patrick Harris. So good. Watch it.

All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom.

Thanks to ma.tt for the tip!

Bay Area WordPress Meetup

There was a meeting of the newly reincarnated Bay Area WordPress Meetup on Sunday at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco. This meetup formerly went by the name of San Francisco WordPress Meetup. Being a resident of Oakland, I prefer the new name, even though the meeting was still in SF. photo credit: Ianiv & Arieanna …

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Ding!

Shikibee dinged level 70 yesterday 🙂 The ding: Shikibee and Riverstar celebrate: Translation: Shikibee is my main character in an online game called World of Warcraft. 70 is currently the highest level. It is a rite of passage for a game geek and unlocks a new level of gameplay. It is customary to say ‘ding!’ …

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Aspie Handbook?

From Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When …

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Macworld 2008

Today was the last day of Macworld. It makes me sad, but there really wasn’t anything left to do there. I saw everything on the expo floor about 5 times, the user conference was over, and I sat in on as many classes and demos at the expo as I could stand. I am fried as always, but can’t wait for next year either.

Macworld makes me happy. I got here at 6:30am on tuesday morning to pick up my badge and wait on line for the keynote. It was already wrapped around the block. 9am came and the keynote started but we were still outside. Hundreds of frozen lemmings. I got into an overflow room at 9:30.

The Keynote: An Outline

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DragThing

I was browsing Macworld online this morning and watched Jason Snell’s video about DragThing, a utility that replaces the mac OS X dock. It can also be used in addition to the standard dock. Half way through watching the video, I could barely wait to try it. I downloaded it before the video was over …

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